


the imperfect art of saving a life

by softnow



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cancer Arc (X-Files), F/M, impromptu trips to louisiana, season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-05 23:07:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15873573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softnow/pseuds/softnow
Summary: she is halfway through the lean cuisine approximation of jambalaya when she lays down her plastic fork and says—to him and to nobody in particular—how unfortunate it is that she’ll never try the real thing.this is how he knows it’s bad.





	the imperfect art of saving a life

She is halfway through the Lean Cuisine approximation of jambalaya when she lays down her plastic fork and says—to him and to nobody in particular—how unfortunate it is that she’ll never try the real thing.

This is how he knows it’s bad.

—

“Pack a bag.” He is at her door six hours later, as insistent as he’s ever been. “Pack a bag, Scully, please. We have to go.”

She asks why, asks what. He can see the worry on her face, the exhaustion beneath it. She’s thinking murder. Thinking aliens. Thinking exsanguinated cows and monsters in the woods and baby-eating cults. And she’s tired. He sees it all in the second before she snaps to, all business and FBI professionalism.

He softens. The charade doesn’t seem worth it now. The surprise. Not if this is the price.

He shows her the plane tickets, crumpled in his anxious fists. “Don’t bother with the suits.”

She stares at them and then at him for a long time.

“Why?”

“Because.” Because, Scully. Because. Please don’t make me say it.

A single, definitive nod. She packs.

—

They land in a thunderstorm, rain sluicing down the cabin windows in sheets so thick it’s a miracle the pilot can see the runway. Mulder carries both of their bags and Scully holds a magazine over her head as they run to the rental car.

He thinks of that Cher song, the one that’s been on every radio station lately. But there’s a big difference between Memphis and New Orleans. And when he looks at Scully slumped next to him with her dark, dark circles and hollow, sallow cheeks, his feet have never been so painfully on the ground.

—

Nominally, it’s a hotel. Functionally, it’s a slightly nicer version of every motel they’ve ever stayed in. But the federal government isn’t bankrolling this excursion, so he feels a surge of animal pride when she comments on the softness of the mattress, the cleanliness of the bathtub. Me, Mulder. Me provide.

He offers to take her to dinner, to order dinner, to go out and forage dinner, but she shakes her head. It’s late. She’s tired. She’d just like to take a bath, please.

He nods like he understands—and he does; it’s just…he doesn’t like it lately when she’s out of his sight. He leaves her bag on the bed and the connecting door unlocked. In his own room, he flips channels for a while, but all the games are blowouts and he doesn’t care about the news and he isn’t in the mood for Skinemax even if he could get it.

There’s a new girl at the desk when he pushes his way back into the main office. She’s reading a magazine and doing a good job of looking like she doesn’t know she works here. She barely registers his presence when he asks for recommendations of things to do, to see. Places to get good jambalaya. She reaches beneath the counter, hands him a stack of colorful brochures, and turns the page.

—

The rain ends in the night and the humidity rises with the sun. He waits for her outside, breathing water and wondering if this was a mistake. But then she steps out, taking care to lock the door behind her, and he’s grateful she doesn’t look at him right away because his jaw is somewhere near the equator.

He’s never seen her in yellow before. At least, not like this. Buttercream yellow, buttercup yellow. The kind of yellow that tastes best, like lemon cake melting on the tongue. It’s a simple little sundress with a shirt collar and no sleeves, with buttons between her breasts and a knot around her waist. The contrast with her coppery hair, her pale skin makes him think of leaves just before the fall. She is August come to life. 

Then she turns and the air goes out of his lungs for a different reason. The bruises beneath her eyes are darker than they’ve ever been and twice as large, purple thumbprint markers of her health. She catches him looking and averts her gaze, hides it behind big, round sunglasses.

“Where are we going?”

“I think you’ll like it.” He finds his place on her lower back and nudges her toward the car. Please, Scully. Please, please like it.

—

It’s the Mississippi, not the Atlantic, and it’s a steamboat, not a frigate, but she still gapes up at him with something like excitement when she realizes what’s happening.

“Wait.” She snags his arm by the dock. “Mulder, your seasickness—”

He shakes his head and folds down his ear to show her the tan Dramamine patch behind it.

“No worries. I’ll be fine. C’mon, Starbuck.”

—

He’s never liked jazz. Or boats. Or tourist traps. But the band’s not bad, and the view’s pretty good, and Scully’s downright ethereal with her face tipped up to the sky, the river breeze ruffling her hair.

They drink overpriced cocktails and ooh and aah at the appropriate sights and stumble onto dry land two hours later, sun-drunk and gin-warmed.

There are two spots of color high on her cheeks and her eyes are bluer than they were this morning. Blue like the ocean. He folds her into the bend of his arm and she lets him. His waterdog. His Navy girl. His siren calling him out to sea.

—

French Quarter. They wander in and out of shops, stop to watch street musicians, throw pocket change at the fountain in Latrobe Park.

Let this be my life, he wishes on thirteen cents. Let this be my next sixty years.

—

“Hungry?” he asks when she starts to flag, leaning against him a little more heavily, smiling a little more slowly.

She hasn’t had an appetite in weeks, has eaten robotically, necessarily, the way you take vitamins or wash your hair. So she shocks the hell out of him when she nods against his shoulder and says, “I want jambalaya.”

He squeezes her waist and speaks low in her ear with all the importance of some great secret. “Oh, Scully. Why do you think we’re here?”

—

It is entirely insane, he realizes, to whisk his partner a thousand miles away for rice and meat. But when she takes that first bite and rolls her eyes back into her head and makes a sound like sex, he really, really doesn’t give a fuck.

“Mulder.” Her mouth is full of sausage and peppers. She covers it with her hand and talks through her fingers. “Mulder, this is so good.”

She eats the whole bowl. It’s the most he’s seen her eat since West Virginia, when they stopped for burgers on the way back from the prison and she stole half his fries.

He watches her lick the last of the sauce from her spoon and feels something loosen in his chest.

—

“You wanna see more stuff? I have brochures.”

They’re on the sidewalk again. The heavy evening air tastes like sugar, sounds like brass.

Scully shakes her head, licks her pink upper lip.

“I’m tired,” she says.

“Okay,” he says. Okay. He drives them back to the hotel-motel and pauses at her door. “I, uh…”

“I had a good day.” She says it quickly, almost defensively, like she isn’t sure she should say it at all.

“I did, too.” Her blue eyes. Her yellow dress. Her thin face turned up to the sun.

“You didn’t have to.”

“Have a good day?”

She shifts her weight, doesn’t quite meet his eye. “Do all this.”

She was the sort of kid who asked for charity donations in lieu of birthday presents, he’s sure of it. He reaches for her, tangles his fingers in the jungle-humid underside of her hair and strokes her jaw with his thumb.

“I know.”

She nods once, her lips pressed together, her chin dimpling. Then she slips his grasp and disappears into her room.

—

The last twenty minutes of the Vikings game. The first twenty minutes of Dateline. Their entire day played back in technicolor on the front wall of his brain.

Remember this: she wore a yellow sundress.

Remember this: she threw coins at a fountain.

Remember this: she ate the jambalaya.

Remember this: she was alive.

—

He knows he sleeps because he is alone and then he is not. Scully stands at the side of his bed, pale in the moonlight, still wearing her lemon cake dress. He tries to sit up, but she pushes him down, climbs over him and silences his questions with her hungry mouth.

It isn’t supposed to be like this. But she rips the sheets away and grinds down hard and is so warm and feral and _Scully_ that he concedes. He understands. They lost whatever it should have been atop Skyland Mountain and again in Allentown. Now there is only this.

—

He tries everything he can think of. Hands, lips, tongue. Her nipples harden and she arches her back but she doesn’t get wet.

A side effect, she tells him. It isn’t his fault.

He tries anyway, Boy Scout determined, until she works him out of his pants and strokes with one small, cool hand. She tells him this is enough, to touch and be touched like this.

He cries when he spurts hot and silky across her belly. He cries when she doesn’t come at all.

—

Dawn is little more than a half-formed thought at the edge of the horizon when she speaks again.

“Mulder.” Her voice is soft but steady. He abandons his sleep charade and rolls towards her. “You know I’m going to die.”

His gut clenches. “Don’t.”

“No. I need you to know. I need you to understand.”

“Scully, no. You aren’t—you’re not going to…”

“But I am. And I’ve…I’ve made my peace with that. But, Mulder—” She rolls to face him, too, her eyes ghostly in the darkness. “I need you to know that I can’t outrun it. That you can’t. No matter what you do, no matter how many plane rides or cities or distractions you give me, I’m as sick today as I was yesterday. And I’m going to be as sick tomorrow.”

You aren’t, he thinks. You won’t be. You ate all the jambalaya. You wore a yellow dress. I’m the one who’s sick. I’m the one who’s going to be sick if you don’t stop talking. Please, Scully. Please stop talking.

“I need to know…” And she reaches for him, her fingers icy on his skin. He shivers and clutches her tight. “I need to know that you’ll let me go.”

“No.” He jerks his head. No. No. Ask me to put a bullet between my teeth, Scully. I’d sooner do that than this.

“Mulder—”

“ _No._ ” A deep breath. “They bought you a tombstone, did you know that? When you were missing. I went with your mother to pick it up. You were already six feet under to her, but you came back. You came back, Scully, and they wanted to turn you off. The doctors, your family— But you _lived._ So don’t…don’t ask me to buy another tombstone. Not when I know you’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”

She is quiet for a long time. He trembles next to her like a thunder-shy dog. His feet are numb. He can’t feel his chest. Finally, after an eternity, she whispers, “It isn’t the same.”

Then: a sound. A wet little sniffle. He thinks she’s crying until he reaches to pull her closer and she rolls away, fumbling for something on the nightstand. He hears the rasp of a tissue jerked from its box.

“I’m sorry,” she mutters. “I’m sorry.”

She’s out of bed before he can stop her, gathering her clothes, tripping towards the connecting door. 

“Scully, please—”

She slips away without looking back. The lock rams home on the other side with the finality of a gunshot, a pulled plug, a handful of dirt.

He lies next to her blood on the pillowcase and feels the phantom weight of her hips in his palms. Sees the gloss of sweat on her collarbones. Tastes the buttercream softness of her smooth bottom lip.

He stretches a hand into the hollow left by her body and tries to imagine a life with no more of her than this.


End file.
